


Carne Por la Machina

by Vetinari



Category: Highlander: The Series, The Expanse (TV), The Expanse Series - James S. A. Corey
Genre: Belter, Immortals in Space, Martian Congressional Republic, Methos has the worst luck, Remember the Cant, The Eros Incident, inner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-27 22:04:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17775038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vetinari/pseuds/Vetinari
Summary: Methos really does have the worst luck sometimes... All he wanted was to update his ship, and take in the nightlife at Eros station.





	Carne Por la Machina

**Author's Note:**

> A quick and dirty foray into dumping Methos into The Expanse universe. (Of course, I have no ownership whatsoever to either Highlander or The Expanse. This is fanfic purely for fun.)
> 
> Short little exercise trying to work out where the infamous ROG would be during the era of humanity's initial expansion into the solar system. Bit of an internal monologue going on here... (I think it works as a standalone piece, but I'd be willing to actually come up with a plot if anyone's actually interested in this x-over idea!)
> 
> The Expanse universe by 'James SA Corey' - books and show are probably my favourite sci-fi currently being written and filmed at the moment. This little piece draws a little from both versions.

Mateo Adán strolled down the cramped corridors of Eros Station, well, more like gently pushed himself along with gentle touches from his toes in the light 0.1g here near the centre of spin. The cramped and damp corridors that made up the residential section of the station this far away from the docks were very different to the loud assault on the senses that made up the broad walkways in the public areas that funnelled everyone towards the casinos, with their multitude of pachinko machines and other tourist scams. The desperate shouting into the void of that area didn’t really count as part of the station proper to the permanent residents. (Not that Mateo was one of them.)

Mateo inhaled the familiar spice of red kibble and vat fungi mixed with the reassuring ozone wafts from the air filters, the scents assuring him that everything was working as it should be, despite the thuggish overzealous ‘security’ being provided by that CPM corporation that had taken over. Quickly picking up a bulb of fungal whisky that would have had Mac frowning about decent quality scotch, he’d grabbed the shuttle to the inner decks from the docks out near the skin of the rock. The Coriolis effect here this close to the centre of spin was noticeable, bad enough that anyone who’d been raised down the gravity well of a planet would struggle with vertigo. Trying constantly to keep their sense of up and down in the microgravity, trying to align themselves with a horizon that simply wasn’t there, with everything drifting in unpredictable ways. The permanent sideways slant pushing from the direction of spin making the whole situation even more confusing to the gravity well raised brain. These were the Belter slums, where no Inner dared tread if they knew what was good for them.

Mateo hungrily bought a portion of white kibble and faux cheese, with a bulb of beer from one of the much more affordable vendors that operated out of the real people section of the station. He casually asked about how business was going, in rockhopper accented Belter creole, the reply in rapid pace Eros cant was surprised,

“Mi pochuye to, na xeta, sasa ke?”

Mateo noted with a resigned grin when the portion the improbably tall and slender vendor had been dishing out for him seemed to double in size. He handed over his casino scrip, politely nodding as he went,

“Tenya wa tim gut.”

For all that he looked the part of an Inner born and raised on old mother Earth (Well, no one knew where immortals came from. Space was as good an explanation as any), Mateo or rather, Methos, had spent more time in the belt than any belter. He’d gone native, gods help him, in the way that used to be Mac’s speciality. Most of the gangrunners, even around these parts so close to the inner planets knew him on sight, thanks to the supply runs he normally used to earn his scrip. The belter that was built thickly, with a small head like an Earther, who could wrangle spare medical supplies out of the meanest MCRN marine and had the OPA credentials burned into his skin to prove it.

Mateo still bore the scars from those early suit contacts that had burnt like crazy, his neck ringed with silvery burns. Though these days the slowly fading marks were viewed as a badge of honour; proof that he’d flown some dodgy runs for the OPA (the rather loftily named Outer Planets Alliance), rather than the truth that he’d been amongst the very first to make the great push away from the Inner planets. He was no born again ex-welwala like Fred Johnson, as far as anyone knew Mateo Adán just had the ‘good’ luck that his bones had grown thick and strong despite the microgravity he’d been born in. (It helped that at 6’3 Methos had always been improbably tall, for once out here, he was improbably short. Belter heights usually started at 2 metres, and only went up. Mateo was a couple of inches short of the average woman’s height out here.)

 Mateo had illicitly treated enough Belters with suspicious injuries and no questions asked that he wasn’t messed with. It wasn’t just the accent, the burns, the tats, and the haircut that bought him safety. Just as you don’t mess with the air, and you don’t mess with the water, people this far out into the dark knew better than to shit where they eat. As a supplier of goods of almost any type, and one who was known for his uncanny ease with the ways of medicking his way around a life-threatening injury – Mateo was relatively safe. Short and squat paxoníseki or not, he walked the walk, floated the float, and talked the talk. No one would mistake him for an Inner when they saw him move in 0g.

Methos was one of the very few immortals to have bothered to come up the gravity well, for the most part those that had abided by the unspoken agreement that The Game didn’t extend beyond the boundaries of Earth. (Methos had encountered Cory Raines, Ceirdwyn, and briefly spotted someone who _might_ have been Gregor Powers in all the centuries he’d been out here.) There was no point in increasing your chances of becoming The One if you simultaneously got yourself spaced, and dead, frozen forever in the vast emptiness of the black. Who knew where you’d end up drifting, Methos had heard enough Belter superstition about the space beyond the elliptic that he knew his own perception of space of being really incredibly incomprehensibly big was barely scratching at the surface. There was a reason that even Belters didn’t complain too much about their transponders showing their location to all and sundry in the solar system, no one wanted to be lost forever.

Methos had been amongst the first in that great push to colonise The Belt, the gold rush after Epstein’s revolutionary discovery had been as fraught and bloody as any other in human history. Despite all his protests to the contrary, Methos had been craving some excitement. Earth had gotten too crowded centuries before; there were too many people, mortal and Immortal, many of them looking for a fight. The Earth’s population of back then… 25billion (Now closer to 31 billion if you could believe it) people had made everything too small.

Immortals had had to be more careful than ever, the promised Gathering had never arrived, and yet, still the head-hunters came searching for vengeance, or glory, or merely as an excuse for their bloodlust. Surveillance equipment was everywhere, not just governments, or shop owners with CCTV, but every phone had a camera, and everyone had a phone. Methos had been amongst the first to volunteer to colonise Mars, one of the earliest settlers in the Mariner valley nearly four centuries ago. He’d gotten caught up in all the excitement, and the war. He’d been as invigorated as the mortals were with their great terraforming effort - the plentiful opportunities for gainful fulfilment that had become few and far between back on mother Earth.

 He’d rubbed shoulders with the mad Texans, the space-hungry Indians, and the desperate Chinese all looking to grab a slice of freedom on a new frontier away from a planet that had gotten far far too crowded. It had been hard work, and dangerous, but satisfying to watch the new generations thrive under the skin of the red planet, with its low 0.38g pull (and complete lack of any food stuff that even vaguely resembled cheese). Much as he’d never admit it to anyone, especially not the likes of Macleod, it was far better than living on Basic, or hiding, living off ancient wealth caches as an undocumented as most Immortals were forced to. Even when the war had broken out, Methos had never regretted his decision to leave the blue marble behind. Embracing everything about the duster way of existence, Texas drawl and all.

Of course, even that great rush, of being among the very first colonists away from Earth, faded with time. The completion estimates for the great terraforming project kept getting pushed back, first by decades, then by centuries. The slow cold war meant that certain supplies, basic building materials, and foodstuffs that Methos had once considered to be staples, became scarce.

Methos was also getting fed up of constantly having to live within the Pierce family’s means, kept purposefully modest so as not to attract too much public interest, as generation after generation of lazy nephew inherited a proportion of the deceptively large family wealth. Even the threat of The Game had begun to look attractive compared to the calculated mediocrity that was his life on Mars. Most of the other early settler families had luxurious above the surface cliffside homes by the time Methos gotten fed up and decided to move on. Epstein’s great invention, nearly two and a half centuries after they’d first settled on the small red planet had set back their great plans by generations. Ironically, the man’s funeral pyre at 5% of the speed of light had paved way for all …this.

At the moment all this consisted of a large portion of white kibble generously coated in dusty cheese analogue, and a bulb of beer. Mateo was currently bedding down in one of the by-the-hour holes used by crews who’d spent too long ship bound, far away from the skin where even the low 0.3g spin gravity was a bit on the high side for the dedicated rock hoppers. The microgravity and intense Coriolis kept this area too vertigo inducing for most Inners. Kept the rent for holes cheap. The dive was cheap, but more importantly no one bothered to look too closely at your ID documentation here, who you were didn’t matter so long as you had scrip, any scrip.

Mateo leisurely made his way inside the… well he supposed he’d have called it a motel back in the day, nodding to the half-asleep Belter who was fronting the desk. The tall woman knew him by sight by now.

Mateo’s ship was currently relegated to a repair yard, docked at the ancient settlement’s shipyard to upgrade the main engines to something a bit less inefficient with the fuel pellets. He’d chosen Eros over Ceres for the lengthy repairs since the docking fees at this, the oldest of humanity’s stations were far more reasonable. Closer to something Mateo Adán could believably afford than the likes of Ceres, or the lofty yards at Tycho.

The primary fusion drive had started burning hot and dirty six months ago, and Mateo was loathe to let the situation get any worse. He knew better than most the horrors of getting stranded in the big empty. The Lipizzaner looked innocuous enough from the exterior; yet another belter bucket cobbled together out of obsolete parts from dozens of older models. The Lipizzaner hid secrets under that scrappy looking outer hull, with its irregular protrusions, lumpen weld-lines, mismatched panels, and numerous water and ice hauling pods disguising all manner of nasty little surprises for any would-be pirates.

For a start Methos’ ship had a paranoid three hulls rather than the more standard two, the additional space, and extra security more than made up for the higher fuel costs. The entirety of the two inner hulls were frequently replaced altogether when the ship got old enough, up to date designs hiding under that outer layer of ‘looks like a piece of crap’ camouflage. This wasn’t that sort of job though, if it had been, he’d have done it himself, probably using one of his Martian identities, and the shipyards at Callisto to do so. Technically the two inner hulls were capable of flying away unscathed if the outer hull was totally destroyed, though Methos was grateful to say he’d never had to test that hypothetical.

The two inner hulls were both constructed with military grade bulkheads, each several thick inches worth of high carbon steel, titanium, and carbon fibre weave composite (each double the standard military thickness) lined with an experimental self-healing gel to quickly seal leaks before more permanent patches could be applied manually (the stuff wasn’t in widespread use yet – once the foam/gel layer was punctured, you’d needed to replace the whole panel, as the foam layer tended to harden completely quite quickly rendering the self-healing completely ineffective. Which could get very expensive very quickly).

The space between the innermost hull and the second skin was kept in vacuum 90% of the time and used primarily as storage. The hidden cargo bays ran the length of the ship, each purposefully misaligned deck given over to individual bays filled with oxygen and water tanks, spares, provisions, the hidden secondary flight deck, a hidden cabin, secret fusion reactor and Epstein drive spares, the secret array of alternate transponders, UN and MCRN power armour, space suits, …and ammunition (Rail gun rounds, PDC rounds, and torpedoes). That area of the ship was a carefully kept secret – oh the extraordinary thickness of the inner hull raised eyebrows, but Mateo usually shrugged off questions with nonsense about extra thick batting, inefficient cabling, bad metallurgical practices back in the ‘old days’ during the infancy of spacefaring, and ancient brownout buffers being a pain to retrofit with newer models.

In the official space between the hulls, nestled between the deceptively thick pristine second hull and that ugly outer skin was a pair of state-of-the-art rail guns. All of the armaments were attached to the outer side of that reinforced second hull, the messy camouflage hull not really capable of taking the stresses of recoil.

The plans for the railguns had supposedly been stolen from the MCRN by the Black Sky branch of the OPA (though Methos had merely metaphorically taken a stroll through their database via one of his many backdoors). The supports for each gun ran the full length of the ship, each gun capable of firing shots that could go clean through the length of a Donnager class warship, and to a casual inspection, apparently were the ship’s primary oxygen sponges and air tanks.

There was an array of point defence cannons, disguised as water tanks, the network twice as dense as a ship of this size needed. The torpedo launchers, this time disguised as ice hauling anchors and exhaust vents were also squeezed into this space, appropriately made to look like part of the ship’s network of manoeuvring thrusters. The space between the outer and ‘inner’ hull was again kept in vacuum and used primarily as a cargo hold – this time kept filled with the ‘official’ cargo that Mateo wanted the authorities to be aware of. The manifest usually listed fungus, rice, grains, and alcohol alongside the provisions required for a ship of this size.

Struts disguised as poorly laid out cargo joists ensured that the ship could cope with the extreme stresses of travelling into and out of a gravity well, with its dire looking hide intact. Despite very careful appearances to the contrary the Lipazzaner was perfectly capable of landing planet-side and could more than hold its own in a dogfight.

Oh yes, The Lipizzaner was a smuggling ship, built using a fraction of the fortune the Pierce family had built up on Mars after centuries of living frugally, despite being one of the founding families (albeit a purposefully forgotten one). By this stage Methos had caches secreted throughout the solar system, oh he didn’t actively hunt out wealth like so many of his fellows, but millennia of experience, and his intimate knowledge of humanity meant that it was just something that he ended up accumulating. Methos understood intimately that wealth was a transitory thing, one minute you were the richest man in all of Scythia, the next civilization had collapsed, entirely swallowed by the sea, and the world had been plunged into 500 years of hell… Methos had resigned himself to that fact of life long before the fall of Rome. Nevertheless, Methos had quietly acquired a fortune out here amongst the outer planets, and had paranoidly put his ship together accordingly.

Ordinarily Mateo wouldn’t dream of letting someone else get their dirty paws on his refuge, but… Mateo needed to get off his boat, he’d been going stir crazy constantly piloting his ship between the Jovian system and the Belt. Quite unawares he’d gradually slipped into the sort of jumpy paranoia that made the truly delicate work of fully shutting down a reactor, completely removing the housing holding the containment envelope, and separating it from an Epstein drive even more risky than usual. And besides, he wasn’t qualified to open up an engine in dock in this lifetime.

Since the entrance to the secret hull space was nestled behind the smelly recycling tanks of the secondary Head, which was shut down due to the reactor and Epstein drive officially being off for repairs, well, Methos had figured it was a calculated risk worth taking. It helped that he knew that the ship’s computer was programmed eccentrically enough that all but the most genius of engineers would struggle to change anything he hadn’t actively asked for.

Mateo had whiled a couple of weeks away on the shallow amusements of the casino, flashy Pachinko, colourful noisy bars, games of Golgo for real scrip, and even a turn or two at the brothels before he’d gotten tired of the social jag. Methos was a perverse creature, when being solitary got too much, he had to get out of his own head, but the urge to be social was usually sated quickly, and often left him resenting company. The slight off-ness that lingered about Eros, all centred on these CPM goons, and their more shadowy masters had probably triggered the urge to leave if he was being entirely honest. Something about their frequent shutdowns of whole sections of the station for ‘renovations’ and repairs that Methos knew didn’t need doing was triggering all of his internal alarms.

The updates to his fusion reactor and drives had been due to take a month – it had been three and a half weeks, and already the crowded space of the small city in the sky was beginning to grate. Methos was expecting the okay to set off any day now. Turning off his mag boots Methos kicked out to the centre of the small room, rejoicing in that brief moment of gibbering terror that he’d be stuck hanging with no handholds, before he reached the crash couch and the small viewscreen at the other end of the small space.

He watched the newsfeeds as he neatly ate his yeasty white kibble, the cold war seemed to be heating up, there was some sort of trouble about Phoebe, the UN and MCR were both claiming the other had killed the small isolated moon. With no staff left on the desolate rock to verify the story one way or the other, the politicians were saving face by shouting at each other. Something was going on on this station, he’d ignored it, perhaps foolishly, but CPM security – the brash thuggish new police force that Eros had apparently hired, had been kicking up whispers. The obvious grigios strutted about the place like preening peacocks, forcibly shutting whole corridors down whilst they did gods knew what. Methos had been noticing them ever since he’d docked, he’d taken his favoured do-nothing approach, partially out of his desperation for a change in scenery, but perhaps that had been unwise.

Something was tickling, telling Methos that Phoebe, the newly hot war, and CPM were all linked. There was an air of quiet anticipation about Eros, something was coming, where it would strike, Earth, Mars, the Belt, no one knew… Methos sucked the last of his beer out of the bulb and made his decision, screw the scrip, he needed to get away from civilisation again. It was too much, after a decade of near isolation, the tense reality of station life; Eros glittering desperately in the same way a terminal patient would fervently live life to the fullest had Methos on edge.

He didn’t care that the guys working on the new fusion core would think he was a mad idiot for running his ship on ‘battery’ back-ups – Methos wanted the safety of several inches of titanium-carbon weave and steel composite between him and whatever was going on out there in the station. Even if the Lipizzaner couldn’t leave dock yet, Methos suddenly craved the security of his ship.

Somehow Methos wasn’t surprised when his typical luck held. One moment he was making his way through the convoluted shuttle routes to the dock, pondering since he was being forced that way anyway, whether he should indulge in one more round at the casinos… The next? A radiation alarm blared loud and shrill, and he’d been trapped in a crowd being herded towards the radiation shelters, something strange masquerading as iodine forced into his arm, and the door clanging resolutely shut.

Shit.

People were slowly panicking. The air was hot with the stench of fear and nervousness. A child cried shrilly. Was it just him or was it getting too hot in here? Someone was whimpering in a corner. The quiet of nervous panicked breathing briefly interrupted by someone else screaming,

“Setóp bush to, sabakawala!

 With a groan the person next to him collapsed, dragging two more people down with him as he went. What the hell? Methos was beginning to feel dizzy himself… The world tilted suddenly, and Methos was almost certain it wasn’t a change in spin. Shit. Shit. Too late _. Too late_!

A metre over the person who’d been making whimpering noises of distress vomited, Methos’ doctors eye saw something alarming and black mingling with the distressingly familiar bodily fluid. Slowly, one by one everyone trapped in the deathbox of a shelter succumbed to whatever was happening, Methos himself slowly sliding to the floor as his quickening struggled to overcome whatever the hell had been done to him, to _all_ of them.

A sickening sense of wrong flashed over the whole room. Pashang. Fuck! Pashang! That was hard radiation, Mateo’s palm terminal flashed a radiation warning at him, confirming his worst suspicions. After an eternity in the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere in the dark little room, the heavy doors ponderously opened and the distressing vomiting population who’d been trapped inside spilled out into the station proper.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah... I have a plot bunny screaming at me over this thing now! So... Watch this space!


End file.
